Smallworld was a GIS company founded in Cambridge, England, in 1989 by Dick Newell and others. It grew to become the global market leader for GIS in utilities and communications, according to Daratech. In September 2000, it was acquired by GE Energy, a division of General Electric. While the company name has gone, the Smallworld name lives on as the brand name for the software technology and applications. Smallworld technology supports application products for Telecommunications, utility and public systems organizations.
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Smallworld Product Suite
The Smallworld Product Suite Offerings mostly include AM/FM/GIS software for outage management (PowerOn), Smallworld Design Manager for engineering design, Smallworld Network Inventory for telecommunications and Smallworld Spatial Intelligence for business analysis. Recent developments include advanced functionality for automation of design activities; in particular modelling and tracking the entire design, which is constructed as built process.
Technology
GE Energy's Smallworld GIS platform is based on two technologies. The first is an object-oriented programming language called Magik that supports multiple inheritance, polymorphisim and is dynamically typed. The second is database technology called Version Managed Data Store (VMDS) that has been designed and optimized for storing and analyzing complex spatial and topological data. The native smallworld datastore can be stored in Oracle. This allows the use of Oracle facilities for backups and recovery.
